ATMA

THE MIDDLE POINT - ART OF MEDITATION

'Witnessing Is Self-Remembering'

Witnessing Is Self-Remembering

Self-remembering is a methodless method that leads toward unity with the whole. When all your unconscious activities become the conscious act of now, and all your doing has been replaced with non-doing, you remember One-Self and have attained awareness. In awareness, you aren’t aware of your awareness. To be aware of your awareness, distance is needed. The Buddha calls self-remembering “right mindfulness.” Krishnamurti calls it “choiceless consciousness.” The Upanishads call it “watchfulness.” The names are different, but they all mean the same thing.

By remembering the self, a paradox arises. The self disappears, while remembering stays. The self and remembering can’t exist together. In the same way, self-consciousness (which is of the mind), self, self-existence, and consciousness can’t be together. In the mind, there is no real existence—only the self, the ego.

Consciousness is always conscious of something, and there is always someone who is conscious. The mind is the source of all duality, all separation, and all division between subject and object, activity or inactivity, consciousness or unconsciousness.

In order to attain ultimate awareness, you have to remain in the state of witnessing every moment of the now. You have to act in the now with awareness. The now moment is nothingness, so you have to act as nothingness, doing nothing, with no movements, just witnessing in stillness.

So consciousness is a quality of the mind. Witnessing is the tool of consciousness, used to disconnect itself from the mind and reconnect with ultimate awareness. This ultimate awareness is the transcendence of consciousness—spaceless space beyond the mind.

We can’t talk about consciousness and unconsciousness as two separate states, but more like in degrees: you can be more or less conscious. There’s no such a thing as darkness, only different degrees of light. Through witnessing, you increase your light within.

When your consciousness becomes all that is, and there are no more unconscious traces in your being, no more conscious witnessing of objects and subjects, so that two realities becomes one reality, you become pure light. Your old mind is no more, but is clear of all thoughts. All vibrations in the mind become only one conscious vibration, so that there’s nothing to witness anymore. Consciousness turns its total attention to itself, witnessing one vibration—that of the witness.

The more you become conscious, the more you come to be a witness. So consciousness is a method to achieve witnessing, and witnessing is a method to achieve awareness.